as wonderful as he is
by Lelderkin
Summary: She's always known she wouldn't be one for a traditional life, and now, thanks to Fenrir Greyback, she knows why. "It's clear that the image of one quiet, pretty Gryffindor cannot hold all of Lavender Brown, but she's determined that no one will know that." Oneshot for the Songs Covered by Glee Competition.


_title: _"Because I wouldn't want to ruin anyone as wonderful as he is." ~Getting Married Today, from _Company_

_summary: _She's always known she wouldn't be one for a traditional life, and now, thanks to Fenrir Greyback, she knows why. "It's clear that the image of one quiet, pretty Gryffindor cannot hold all of Lavender Brown, but she's determined that no one will know that."

_notes_: So this is for the Songs Covered by Glee competition on the HPFC. I usually don't do challenges, but I was lurking on that forum and this one seemed right up my alley, since most of my stuff is inspired by music anyway. So...here's this. Hope you enjoy, and please do leave a comment if you're able!

* * *

She has never been the sort for moderation. It's something she learned long ago when her parents tried to limit her to one piece of candy after dinner. More often than not she'd end up with a stomach ache, sticky fingers, and a guilty conscience.

The way she sees it, not many people like the sort of person who is altogether too much. Most people like those that they can categorize into boxes: the smart people, the funny people, the beautiful people. She's known this for a long time, especially upon arriving at Hogwarts – right away, they are split into the brave people, the smart people, the ambitious people, and the loyal people. It doesn't matter to the Sorting Hat that she thinks she has rather a good brain on her and she'd die to protect her family and she dreams of someday being important. No, to the Sorting Hat she is GRYFFINDOR, one shouted word just a moment after it is placed on her head.

It becomes very, very important that she be liked. She doesn't know where the desperation came from, as she's always considered herself shy and unable to make friends easily. Maybe it's this that pushes her to be someone _new_ at the age of eleven, someone people love to talk to and joke with.

It is Seamus Finnigan who convinces her that it won't be that hard. He is the second Gryffindor to be Sorted, and he joins the table with a smile. "Pretty brilliant, huh?" he whispers to her as he swings his legs over the bench directly next to her. She smiles weakly, unable to think of anything to say, but he doesn't seem to mind. "I was hoping for Gryffindor."

It's then that she realizes she's the only one who feels like one House isn't enough for her. It's then when she resolves to be a Gryffindor, to put the rest of herself aside in favor of House camaraderie and the need to be accepted.

And so begins her Hogwarts career.

* * *

The first time she overflows, it's painful and public and surprising. She is a third-year, and the air is thick with fear over Sirius Black. She gets the news that her bunny died and somehow she can't keep it in, can't control the open emotion where everyone can see it. Hermione Granger says something derisive about Professor Trelawney and October the sixteenth, and she chokes back sobs she didn't know were inside of her.

Parvati comforts her afterward, telling her it wasn't embarrassing and that anyone would have reacted the same way. She can't help but be ashamed by her show of melodrama, especially since she has kept rather to herself since the start of Hogwarts.

It becomes a mission of hers to hide the overflows, as well. It's clear that the image of one quiet, pretty Gryffindor cannot hold all of Lavender Brown, but she's determined that no one will know that. She wants to be a normal girl; she wants to fit; she doesn't want to be so much that no one can handle her.

Her overflows become private, when no one is around to see all that she truly is. Sometimes she cries and sometimes she screams, but no one is ever there to hear, and that's how it should be.

Seamus somehow becomes the exception.

She did not want him to be. She specifically tried to stop it from happening. But happen it does, without any input from her.

Fourth year, he takes her to the Yule Ball. She is so flattered to be asked that her mask slips as they twirl around the room, his arms around her waist keeping her firmly close to him. She laughs too loudly, too wildly. She dances with abandon, as though no one is looking and judging (although she knows they are). And at the end of the night, she kisses him.

She very well knows that the boy is supposed to make the first move, that girls kissing boys is the wrong way round. But he doesn't seem to mind her forwardness – seems almost grateful for it – and they spend far too long wrapped around each other, exploring and learning and laughing breathlessly in between kisses.

That night, she tells him far too much. She tells him that she feels like she has so many extra bits to her, and sometimes they come popping out when she least expects it. She tells him that she just wants to be normal, that she just wants everyone to like her. She tells him that she knows she isn't but she's tried to long to hide it.

He listens. It is something of a miracle that he listens. No one ever has before – not that she's tried to say any of this aloud before. He doesn't seem to judge her. He just listens and runs his fingers through her hair and looks contemplative.

When she's done, when she's talked for so long that her voice gets hoarse, he tells her he doesn't think any of that about her. He thinks she is a big personality, yes, but that's just that she has a lot to offer. She has so much inside of her that anyone is lucky to see even part of it. He tells her that she could never be normal, but she wouldn't want to be, because being extraordinary is so much better.

When he says it like that – when he tells her she is extraordinary – she knows she is lost to him.

* * *

They don't stay together for long. What fourteen-year-olds have successful relationships? They are awkward and they don't know how to act around other people, and pretty soon they decide it was all easier when kissing and labels weren't involved.

She tells herself that she is moving on. When she has a fling with Terry Boot in fifth year, during the height of Dumbledore's Army, she thinks this is best for her. She's becoming a regular teenager, dating and not having it mean she has to confess her deepest secrets.

But with Seamus, something is always there.

It's not fair, not at all. The fact that he has such a hold over her – that no matter who she tries to distract herself with, she is always so completely his – drives her mad.

She fights it and fights it, refusing to give up on trying to feel something real for somebody else. She's pretty sure that explains the whole Ron debacle, because she's not sure what else could.

He is awkward and gangly and cheerful, always cracking jokes and never hiding who he is. That pulls her in, the fact that he knows who he is and everyone else does too. Sure, he's something like Harry's shadow, but he's also his own person, and everyone likes him for it.

She kisses him. She knows that's still the wrong way round, but something in her thinks if she repeats what happened with Seamus, maybe the feelings will be repeated too.

They aren't. The majority of their relationship is physical, and she spends most of it overflowing and being unable to stop it, unable to hold it in. Around him, she is a gooey mess, desperate for his approval and stunned every day when he hasn't yet broken up with her. She knows she's irrational, she knows she's becoming far too much to handle, but she can't stop herself. In her struggle to feel something for someone else, she has let out all the emotions she has spent so long taming.

Her last overflow occurs in the Gryffindor Common Room, and all she feels, really, is relief. One second she's raging at Ron, and the next she's come to her senses, woken up from her months of suffocating emotion.

Seamus finds her later. She is sitting in an empty classroom, staring blankly ahead of her, feeling a lot of nothingness – a welcome emotion. He knocks lightly on the doorframe, startling her, and then comes to sit next to her on a desk.

"Are you alright?" he asks softly, being so heartbreakingly kind that suddenly she's crying again.

"Seamus," she sobs out, as his arm winds around her shoulder, "I've been such a fool. I've spent so long trying to convince everyone that I'm _not_ the girl who feels too much, and all I've done is undo all that hard work! I'm not normal at all, and I'm certainly not extraordinary! I'm a silly twat who's lost the respect of my peers _and _the persona I spent so much time on!"

He doesn't say anything. He just holds her close, and lets her be too much.

* * *

It's her final year at Hogwarts that teaches her that maybe she can be categorized, that maybe the Sorting Hat was right.

It's a year spent on futile resistance and petty rebelliousness, but somewhere along the way it starts to mean something. Mouthing off in Muggle Studies becomes a symbol of hope. Making fun of Amycus's pig face means maybe getting some first years to laugh, even if it means the ringing of _crucio_ in her ears for the next three days.

Maybe she is brave.

She and Seamus and the Patils move into the Room of Requirement together, because there is safety in numbers, or at least they like to pretend. They spend hours in there, with nothing to do and not much to say. Neville tries to rally them all every once in awhile, but it's starting to feel like a lost cause, especially when they think of all the younger students left to the mercy of the Carrows.

And then Harry's there. Harry, who she'd half-believed to be dead. Harry, who is supposed to be there chance. And he's telling them all that they get to fight.

She doesn't feel very scared. Mostly, she's invigorated, adrenaline pumping through her. Maybe it's because Seamus whispers in her ear, right before the first Death Eaters invade, "Now's your time to be extraordinary."

She doesn't last long. She expected dueling, some sort of skill to be involved. Instead, she's bowled over by something furry and terrifying, and she doesn't know if it's human or animal and it doesn't matter, because she's in so much pain.

* * *

It's months before she'll allow any visitors who aren't her parents or Seamus. At first, she's not allowed to see anyone, in the worry that it will just make her worse. But soon they've told her she can have someone in the room as long as they don't exhaust her.

It's Seamus that comes every day, and it isn't easy for her to accept that.

She has always been pretty. That was never something she denied herself; she was a lovely girl, if nothing else. But now she is anything but – her face is irreparably disfigured, the skin of her neck torn to shreds, her chest and stomach crisscrossed with spindly red lines that will never go away. And the fact that Seamus, the boy she has always loved, is seeing it all, terrifies her. He already knows far too much about her. Now he is being allowed to see even further behind the curtain.

Her mother forces her to let him in. Calista adores the boy, considers him a perfect gentleman. And she sees quite clearly his love for her daughter, even if Lavender herself cannot.

And so day by day, she heals, with him beside her all the way.

She is allowed to leave the hospital after almost a full year of her being inside of it. The idea of going back out into the real world is overwhelming and embarrassing, and she cries for much of the journey back to her parents' house. She sees the stares, the disgust on the faces of passersby when they see a young girl with such a garish face. She cannot pretend that it doesn't affect her.

Somehow, Seamus persuades her to go to the memorial service with him on the second of May, two weeks after she's out of the hospital.

She is fully conscious of the fact that she is just as abnormal on the outside as she is on the inside. She is there for everyone to gape at. But the experience is quite humbling, for she comes to see that she is not the only one damaged beyond repair. Some are missing limbs, some limp, one girl is missing an eye. And worse, far worse, than the physical losses are the emotional ones. There is conspicuously only one Weasley twin; a baby boy with electric blue hair is carried by his grandmother instead of his mother; Dennis Creevey doesn't take a single picture.

She is not the only one to have become strange, unusual. She is in a room filled with broken people, and with them, she finds peace.

* * *

He proposes to her at midnight by a lake with flowers, and it's everything she'd dreamed of as a little girl.

They are laying together, looking up at the stars, holding hands and not speaking. And then suddenly he's hovering above her, pale-faced and biting his lip.

"Lavender?" he murmurs.

"Yeah?"

"Will you marry me?"

She gasps and sits up to look at him, and he's kneeling in front of her then, a ring clutched between his forefinger and thumb, a bouquet of roses in the other hand.

"You mean it? You really want – me?"

"Who else could I possibly want?"

She laughs with disbelief and then she's crying too, and she throws herself at him and knocks the roses from his hands as she lands on top of him, hysterical with elation.

He slips the ring on her finger and she stares at it, disbelieving, unsure if she should even be this happy. "But _how_?" she asks him.

"What do you mean?"

"How do you ever want to marry me?"

He runs his fingers through her hair, watching as the strands separate and come back together. "You're beautiful." She makes a noise of derision, but he stops her with a stern look in his eyes. "I mean it, you're bloody gorgeous. You always have been. And these - " he runs a careful finger along her shoulderblade, which is marred by an ugly red gash - "these just show how brave you are. And you're smart, and sweet, and funny. You're strong. You take care of people. You have so much to give to the world. You've always thought that you were too much. But I've always thought you were just enough to fill the empty spaces in me."

She wrinkles her nose at his corny line, but there are tears in her eyes. "I love you, Lavender," he says, and she chokes on a sob.

"I love you too," and then her face is buried in the crook of his neck as she shakes with all the overflowing emotions she's always had.

* * *

And then she realizes she's ruining him.

He is whole, and happy, and full. She is broken, and wrong, and endless. He can't possibly want her.

"I'm not getting married," she tells her mother, and she does not see surprise on Calista's face when she says this.

"Does Seamus know about this belief of yours?" she asks coolly, an eyebrow raised.

"No, I – I can't tell him, he'll act like he wants it – us. But he _can't_, all I'll be doing is hurting him. He'll just have to stop loving me, it can't be that hard, and - "

"Have you ever thought that maybe he doesn't have a choice in loving you?"

"Well, that's my point! He deserves better than me, he deserves someone normal, not someone broken and so utterly messed up. I have to give him that chance. I have to give him no choice but to _stop_."

"Lavender," her mother says, coming close and putting her hands on her daughter's shoulders, "he chose to propose to you, to spend the rest of his life with you. He _wants_ everything that you have to offer, even if you don't think it's worthy."

They stare at each other for a long time, neither saying a word. Then she nods, once, and her mother smiles. "Do you want to look at the guest list, then?"

* * *

She never forgets her feelings of not being right, especially with regards to him.

He knows this, she's pretty sure. She knows he knows because he says, during their first dance as a married couple, "Thank you for going through with this."

She knows he knows because he tells her daily the sorts of things he told her when he proposed: that he thinks she's beautiful and brave and better than everyone else, not just different. He tells her there is no one else like her, and that's why he loves her so much.

And one day, she realizes something. "Seamus," she says suddenly when they're in bed, her head on his chest and his arms wrapped tightly around her.

"Lavender," he says, his voice husky the way it gets when he's sleepy.

"I've just figured something out."

"Please do share," he says, and she can hear the laughter in his voice.

"I'm always the girl who says too much or acts too crazy, and sometimes it runs over. You know that." He nods and rests his chin on her head. "Well, I've just realized. All those times I've run over, you're the one who takes all of the extra bits. And – and you don't just take them, you _shape_ them. You shape me. You make me into something workable, something to look at, something – beautiful."

She looks up at him, then, and he's smiling faintly, his eyes closed. "I like that. I'm your sculptor."

She nods and lays back down again. She thinks he's asleep after that, but then she hears him murmur, "And just as clay is nothing without someone to shape it, a sculptor is nothing without something to shape."

Her breath catches. And then he says, "You're my masterpiece."


End file.
